Podcasting since 2005! Listen to Latest SolderSmoke
Friday, April 15, 2022
TV Homebrew 84 years ago -- Tracking Down W9YEI's 1939 Television Receiver -- The CRT He Probably Used -- Please Help Find More Info
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
The First Commercial SSB Trans-Atlantic Radiotelephone System
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Tim Hunkin's (The Secret Life of ...) New Series , and First Show (on Sensors) (Video)
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Colin M1BUU's Homebrew Manhattan SST
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Bluetooth, Winston Churchill, The Speed of Light, and a 1938 Zenith Receiver
Hello Bill -
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Barrie Gilbert and Tinkering, Surplus, and the Visceral Experience of Electronics
From https://www.edn.com/analog-back-to-the-future-part-two/ :
"Gilbert believes that childhood hardships—including at age three losing his father in World War II, leaving his mother and three other children penniless—force one to be resourceful. Before and during his teenage years, he had access to a plethora of inexpensive military surplus gear which greatly helped to make him inventive. Gilbert laments that today's aspiring engineers are lacking the visceral experience of handling and hefting large coils and tuning capacitors, transformers and vacuum tubes, and such. Today’s surplus circuit boards are all but useless as a source of inspiration, or even “spare parts” to tinker with."
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A really wonderful autobiography by Barrie Gilbert starts on page 7 of this page: https://hephaestusaudio.com/media/2009/06/the-gears-of-genius.pdf
Monday, November 8, 2021
Save $2970! Build this $30 DIY Microphone!
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Farhan's Amazing Knack Story: From a Boyhood SW Receiver to the Design of the sBITX SDR
-- Farhan talks about his practice of taking the pictures of new rigs with the new rig sitting atop the book that was most important in its design and construction. FB.
-- I was really blown away by Farhan's presentation of how the uBITX advertisement was inspired by and in many ways based on the Heathkit ad for an HW-101. Amazing.
-- I learned a lot from Farhan's discussion of SDR theory. I pledge to spend more time with this. I really like Farhan's hybrid HDR/SDR approach.
-- But I have a question: Farhan seems to say that we'd need a big expensive GOOGL computer to do the direct sampling HF SDR. But doesn't the little RTL-SDR do just that? Without a GOOGL?
-- Great to see Wes's AFTIA being used in the sBITX.
-- Really cool that Farhan has his mind on VHF transverters when designing the sBITX. I liked use of the TCXO module to free up one of the Si5351 clock outputs. FB. And great to include an idea from Hans in this rig.
Thanks very much to Farhan (who stayed up until 3 am to do this!) and to the RSGB for hosting.
Sunday, October 17, 2021
2 Meter Homebrew: The Fredbox (Video)
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Kintsugi -- A Japanese Philosophy for the Owners of Imperfect Rigs
On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 4:05 PM Bob Scott wrote:
Hi Bill:After listening to the latest Soldersmoke I thought you might find the Japanese concept of "kintsugi" (literally "golden joinery") interesting.From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi#Philosophy As a philosophy, kintsugi is similar to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect.[11][12] Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear from the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage, and can be seen as a variant of the adage "Waste not, want not".[13]
Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of mushin (無心, "no mind"), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life.[14]
Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated... a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin....Mushin is often literally translated as "no mind," but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.
— Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics73,Bob KD4EBM
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I shared Bob's Kintsugi message with David, WA1LBP. David was one of the few radio amateurs in the ranks of the Foreign Service. He was in Okinawa during the early 1990s, when I was in Santo Domingo. For a time we both wrote columns in the "73 International" section of Wayne Green's magazine -- this made us "Hambassadors." David is a real scholar of difficult Asian languages. During my last years in government service I would sometimes cross paths with David at lunch time on the National Mall in Washington -- he'd be out there with a colleague, studying ancient Chinese poetry.
Here are David's thoughts on this:
Thanks, Hambassador Bill.Chan embraced this account of nonduality and Buddha-nature, but distinctively used it to qualify the meaning of Buddhist practice and the personal ideal of the bodhisattva. In the Platform Sutra attributed to Huineng, he insists that
meditation is the embodiment (ti) of wisdom, and wisdom is the functioning (yong) of meditation.
The point of Chan is to see one’s own “original nature” (benxing, 本性) and realize “authentic heartmind” (zhenxin, 眞心), and in doing so the dualities of thought and reality, of passion and enlightenment, and of the impure and pure all dissolve. Then,
true suchness (zhenru, 真如) is the embodied structure (ti) of thinking, while thinking is the functioning (yong) of true suchness. (Platform Sutra, 13–17)
To see our own original nature is to see that true suchness and thinking are as intimately related as the bodily structure of a horse and its customary activities. Just as the bodily structure of the horse establishes the conditions of possibility for grazing and galloping, it is only the proven evolutionary advantage of grazing and galloping in horse-like ways that have made this bodily structure possible. True suchness or ultimate reality is not a preexistent something “out there” that can be grasped intellectually or accessed through some mystical vision; it can only be enacted.
Huangbo Yixun (d. 850) describes this as demonstrating no-“mind” (wuxin, 無心) or freedom from conceptual impositions that would define or limit reality. But this is not a lapse into mental blankness or indiscriminate presence. Realizing no-“mind” restores our originally whole mind (yixin, 一心) that Huangbo qualifies as the “silent bond” (moqi, 默契) of “conducting oneself as all Buddhas have” (in Taishō shinshō daizūkyu, Vol.48, 2012.380b to 383c). Significantly, the term “qi” originally referred to notches or tally marks on a strip of bamboo that record the terms of a trade agreement and the bonding that Huangbo invokes is thus one of mutually entrusted obligation and responsibility. True suchness consists in the personification of the bodhisattva ideal of realizing liberating forms of relationality. Ultimate reality consists in enacting the morally-inflected nonduality of wisdom and compassion.
David
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I remember that it was George Dobbs, G3RJV who introduced us to the concept of Wabi sabi:
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2010/04/homebrew-hero-george-dobbs-g3rjv.html
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Video: E. Howard Armstrong and Early Radio
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
More Info on Tom's Amazing Junkbox 20 meter Receiver (using FPGAs)
Tom also sent me Firmware sourcecode that may be reusable for STM8 users, and the FPGA design file (for Quartus users). If anyone has a GitHub or similar site that can host these files, please let me know and we will send them to you.
Saturday, July 3, 2021
M0NTV's Latest Breadbox Rig -- The Radio Gods Have Spoken (TRGHS)!
Monday, June 14, 2021
M0NTV's Latest FB SSB Transceiver
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Tom's Receiver -- A 20 Meter Superhet Built From the Junkbox
Wow, this is really an amazing project. It is so good that I'd like to believe that it is really "all our fault," but the credit obviously goes to Tom, the very intrepid builder. In a more just world, Tom would be given a ham radio license solely on the basis of this project. Great work Tom. We look forward to more Solder Defined Radios from your workbench.
I stumbled across your podcast a few years ago. I had no interest in
amateur radio, I was just looking for an electronics podcast that
actually discussed electronics (naming no names here, obviously).
Well, the inevitable happened, and some of your enthusiasm rubbed off
on me. I now find myself humbly enclosing a photograph of my first
homebrew receiver for 20m.
The project was one of those "spontaneous construction" affairs,
triggered mainly by breaking up an old satellite receiver (I've
honestly no idea what it was for) which yielded up several SBL1s and a
10.7MHz crystal filter - these form the key elements of the new
receiver. It's a full SDR (solder defined radio) of a conventional
single-conversion superhet arrangement. The chief abnormality is that,
because the IF filter is as wide as the proverbial barn door, I only
use "one edge" - the other half of the passband being provided after
conversion to baseband. Of course, that only works if there are no
massively strong stations in the 6kHz above where you're listening,
but it seems to be ok most of the time. It does give me the advantage
of being able to adjust the lowpass point of the AF signal by
adjusting the BFO, which is nice.
You'll notice there's a lot of "digital nonsense" in the picture, for
what's supposed to be an analogue radio. This "supervises" the two
VCOs: There is an FPGA which implements a pair of frequency meters and
an STM8 microcontroller which is in charge of adjusting the control
voltages to keep the VCOs where they should be. It's all slightly
roundabout because I wasn't clever enough to design a PLL which would
give the required resolution (and I wanted to do something "more RF"
than throw down a DDS chip).
This gives me stability as well as fancy bells and whistles, like
numeric readout, tuning info via RS232, automatic scanning and
frequency presets. I've used a (cheap) industrial/automation style
encoder for the tuning control, which gives a lovely analogue-like
action.
Despite my best efforts (and a lot of ferrite in strategic places) I
wasn't able to keep all the digital spurs out of the receiver. So I
devised a dirty hack by way of a button which will shift the MCU an
DAC clocks to a different frequency. I can't remove the spurs, but now
I can hide them!
So far I've played with a "long" wire and a little shielded loop for
antennas - I'm in a first floor flat with a lot of noise locally, and
my plan is to get a loop up in the loft space (so the next project
might be a rotator!). I fancy maybe seeing if I've space for an
inverted V, too.
You'll notice that I've not attempted a transmitter. That, of course,
is because I'm not yet a licenced ham! However, I'm intending to put
that right sometime later in the year. Then - who knows - I might make
a contact!
Thanks for reading (although really it's the least you could do given
that this *is* all your fault) and I hope you've enjoyed hearing about
all the trouble your little podcast has got me into.
Keep up the good work gentlemen,
73 from South-West England.
Tom.
PS. I also have a copy of Bill's book, which I've very much enjoyed.
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Remastered! The Secret Life of Radio -- With Updated Comments from Tim Hunkin
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Mending vs. Ending -- The Fight Against Planned Obsolescence
We don't get a lot of mail from Darwin, Australia, so the message coming in from Phil VK8MC immediately got our attention. When I looked into the details I realized that it was very SolderSmoke-relevant. The Guardian article that Phil cited even mentions hobbyists tinkering with electronic devices in their sheds (that would be us!). Phil points to the connection between our repair efforts and the struggle to save the planet: "It's not just a hobby, it's an ethical position which contributes to the well being of the planet. A higher calling indeed!"
Here is the article Phil pointed us to:
The poster above (which hangs above my workbench) is from https://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto.
Friday, March 12, 2021
The Secret Life of LEDs -- A new Tim Hunkins Video
Monday, March 8, 2021
AA7EE Casually Kills a Direct Conversion Receiver, then Coldly Discards a Diode Ring Mixer
I was really glad to see that Dave AA7EE has -- after a long absence -- posted another article on his blog. The article has some great personal reminiscences about his involvement with direct conversion receivers. Here is one passage:
I spent many happy hours tuning around and listening on 80M with the DSB80. It was this first experience that cemented my affinity for direct conversion receivers built with commercially available diode ring mixer packages. It just seemed so simple – you squirt RF into one port, a VFO into the other, and (after passing the result through a diplexer) amplify the heck out of the result. The seeming simplicity of the process of converting RF directly to baseband audio has held great appeal for me ever since. Unfortunately, that project didn’t survive. One day, in later adulthood, in my apartment in Hollywood, I reversed the polarity of the 12V DC supply and, discouraged at it’s subsequent refusal to work, tossed the whole thing away. Now, I cannot quite believe that I did that, but it was during a long period of inactivity on the ham bands, and complete lack of interest. If only I could go back, and not have thrown it into the dumpster of my apartment building! Hollywood is ridden with recent notable history. My little double sideband transceiver met it’s unfortunate end just 100 feet from the spot where Bobby Fuller, of The Bobby Fuller Four, was found dead in his car, in 1966, the subject of a still unsolved mystery to this day. The death of my little DSB rig was a lot less mysterious. To think that I heartlessly tossed an SBL-1 mixer into a dumpster, is a mark of how far I had strayed from my homebrewing roots, forged in a little village in England. Now, a few years later, in a city known for it’s sin and excess, I had cruelly ended the life of a stout and honest diode ring mixer. I suppose I should spare a thought for the polyvaricon but, well, you know – it was a polyvaricon!
https://aa7ee.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/the-ve7bpo-direct-conversion-receiver-mainframe/